Roland Juno 106, Yamaha RX-5 Just Part Of Scan 7's All Analog Setup
Scan 7 has long been a prominent name in the canon of techno music, and solid interviews with the elusive production crew are hard to come. While at Movement 2007, however, we managed to catch up with Trackmasta Lou and Seven. The main question we wanted to ask was their opinion on the current divide between analog and digital production and djing.
Being part of the Cratesavers Label, Scan 7 generally use analog equipment as much as possible. Even down to the recording step, they use tape to record their final mixes. Although not opposed to digital technology (they have downloads available online), Scan 7 sticks to their philosophy that analog simply sounds better. Watch for our second interview with them soon.
BILL HOLLAND: Hey everybody. Welcome back. We're at Movement 2007 Detroit and I'm here with Crate Savers Records' Scan 7, Trackmaster Lou and?
SEVEN: Seven.
BILL HOLLAND: And Seven. Thanks for coming out today and talking to me.
TRACKMASTER LOU: Thanks for having us.
BILL HOLLAND: All right. Now you guys have a philosophy of making music that everything you do is done analog. Nothing is processed digitally. Does that include recording the actual record?
SEVEN: I didn't hear the last part of the question.
BILL HOLLAND: Does that include recording the actual record.
SEVEN: Yeah. We actually use analog gear to record. We produce everything on analog. We don't translate it into a sampled sound or anything like that. We just take it straight from the board straight into the recording machine. It's just that I'd like to think personally with analog stuff, I like the way that just the manual clocks that they have a certain lag to them and that's something that you can't get within a computer environment because once you are in one environment, you're committed to that one environment, and I think that the reason and the benefit of using analog -- I'm not saying that digital is lacking or anything but our benefit is just that lag, that feel, that is just those certain nuances that you can't get out of a ready-made environment that analog brings to you.
BILL HOLLAND: Great. Now what kind of equipment when you shoot live -- When you play live, what are you using live? What are you performing with>
TRACKMASTER LOU: Well, we're performing with a Juno 106, the famous RX5 that's not even available anymore and that's hard to find, thank God. We also use the MPC2000 and the 2500 and outboard effects.
BILL HOLLAND: Great. So now how do you translate that? Is it the same in the studio as it is live? Or when you're live, is it a completely different setup?
SEVEN: I think is -- When we perform live, I think it that actually really closer than that thus saying at the studio we got to remember. We kind of come from the old school days where we did a lot of realtime editing when we created a song, and that a lot of those times you can't recapture, but what you can do is that the equipment that you do have you can do some realtime editing and some realtime movement and effects in your live set. You know, a lot of this stuff like as you know back, you know when people used to record analog is sometimes you get one take. You don't get a chance to go back and then you know you'd look at it and that's it is what it is, and yeah that's the type of approach we take to the live set as well and sometimes in the studio too, you know. The record business sometimes dictates things but we're kind of against the grain as you probably know by now but you know that's how we pretty much operate live-wise.
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